Since the dawn of civilization, humankind has gradually formed ever-larger cooperative networks, first by changing minds, and then by changing institutions. But with nationalist forces around the world threatening to reverse that progress, proponents of multilateralism will need to show why international cooperation is not just valuable, but necessary.
KIEL – In country after country, populists are beckoning voters to pursue atavistic dreams of national glory and abandon international commitments and multilateral cooperation. This is the age of “America first,” “Take back control,” and “Hungary belongs to the Hungarians” – to cite just a few of the slogans one hears nowadays.
Yet, when it comes to global problems, there can be no alternative to cooperation. Without it, we will all be at the mercy of cyber conflicts, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation. We will be buffeted by the spillover effects of financial crises, failed states, pandemics, and massive involuntary migrations. And we will have to learn to live with water and food crises, increasingly catastrophic weather events, and ecosystem collapse.
The question, then, is how to save multilateralism from populist forces. In fact, while multilateralism certainly appears to be on a collision course with nationalism, the two are not necessarily incompatible. The task for multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the G20 is to bring them into a complementary alignment.
Multipronged Multilateralism
Multilateral organizations should focus not on what already works, but rather on what is missing in their approach to international issues. Broadly speaking, global-governance institutions need to shore up their battered legitimacy, which will require action in three areas.
The first could be called economic recoupling. In the past, the G20 has primarily emphasized financial and economic issues, and understandably so, given the 2008 global financial crisis and subsequent recession. But since then, many developed countries have also been confronting profound social crises. At the same time that societies have become more fragmented, economic growth has become decoupled from wellbeing. With many people feeling disempowered and alienated from their communities, multilateral institutions must focus on “recoupling” economic activities and social outcomes.
A second area of focus must be social engagement. For multilateralism to enjoy broad public support, it must engage citizens more directly, so that they have a stake in developing cooperative solutions to shared problems. And that leads to a third, complementary front for action: the development of identity-shaping narratives, which can furnish individuals with a sense of agency in effecting change – both within themselves and in their communities.
Among global-governance bodies, the G20 has a key role to play in reviving multilateralism, because it is the best positioned to bring together developed and major developing countries. In fact, the G20 is probably the only institution with the capacity to develop both concrete solutions to global problems and shared narratives to spur citizens into action. Through the G20, national and multilateral narratives can be reconciled in such a way that each strengthens the other.
Recoupling and Realignment
Recoupling social and economic outcomes is not just desirable in itself; it is also crucial for saving multilateralism. In recent years, populists have been able to claim that only they represent the disadvantaged or people threatened by economic and technological change. They purport to speak for those who have lost their jobs to outsourcing and automation, for young people facing unemployment in an increasingly high-skill labor market, and for communities that have been left behind in the era of globalization.
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Meanwhile, they have attacked institutions like the G20 for supposedly ignoring these problems, while focusing solely on issues that are most important to privileged elites. But the G20 can push back against this charge, first by acknowledging that the problems confronting many developed countries are not exclusively economic or rooted in inequality. After all, populists have been able to tap into voter discontent even in countries experiencing strong economic growth.
In many countries, the most fearful citizens are not necessarily poor. But they do feel disempowered. There is a growing sense that one cannot improve one’s fortunes through one’s own efforts. Against a backdrop of changing social environments, many people have come to believe that the system is stacked against the many for the benefit of the privileged few.
For those whose wellbeing has become decoupled from overall economic prosperity, the problem is not just economic, but also psychological. And the sooner that we recognize that fact, the sooner we can address these voters’ legitimate fears.
The responsibility for recoupling communities and socioeconomic outcomes will largely fall on national governments. But the G20 can contribute by coordinating policies across borders, sharing best practices, and establishing global norms. In the process, it will be promoting a form of multilateralism that directly serves national interests.
Moreover, many national interests depend on the sound management of global public goods such as financial stability, and of global commons such as fishing areas on the high seas. To safeguard such goods, multilateral institutions must discourage countries from acting unilaterally in pursuit of selfish national interests. The payoff of cooperation is generally positive for all countries involved.
Clearly, multilateralism can serve national interests. But multilateral institutions can be effective only when they enjoy social acceptance and political legitimacy. Achieving that will require increased social engagement.
Power to the People
Multilateralism will not be saved by technocrats, experts, and bureaucrats alone. Even the most astute and well-crafted paternalist policies will inevitably leave citizens feeling disempowered. When people are not adequately informed of a policy’s purpose, they will not feel inclined to support it – or its author. For policymakers in multilateral institutions, this problem becomes more acute when politicians blame them for national policy failures, while taking credit for successes – a pattern of behavior that underlies the European Union’s current malaise.
Another problem arises when a policy’s success depends on voluntary compliance from non-state actors such as businesses, civil-society organizations, and ordinary citizens. This dependence has increased as the G20 has widened its purview from macroeconomic and financial issues to cybersecurity, anti-corruption, climate action, and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Voluntary compliance requires an engaged global citizenry. People want to feel a sense of agency over transnational issues; when they do, they will readily accept multilateral interventions. Moreover, when people have the power to act in the global public interest, they will be more motivated to do so. Around the world, people are already advancing collective goals by recycling, purchasing fair-trade products and electric cars, and so forth.
Still, more action is needed. Conventional economic instruments – taxes, subsidies, regulations, and so forth – cannot elicit genuine social engagement. Treating people as rational, selfish, utility maximizers, in accordance with neoclassical economic orthodoxy, simply will not do. Rather, sustained service in the public good rests on other-directed, irreducibly social motives such as personal esteem and recognition, group affiliation, and altruism.
Unless such motives are activated in the service of civic participation, grassroots support, and political legitimacy, multilateral policies are ultimately doomed to failure, because they will inevitably be sabotaged from within. On the other hand, when enough citizens become involved, so, too, will businesses and non-governmental organizations.
For its part, the G20 should explore ways to bring business and politics back into line with the common good. For example, it could host debates on fundamental questions such as whether corporations of the future should maximize shareholder value or how governments should address the widening disconnect between geographic/political boundaries and the near-borderless world of digital social networks and data flows. Social engagement will be critical for answering such questions in ways that serve the public interest.
Social Stories
Much of humankind’s success as a species stems from the ability to cooperate beyond the bounds of kinship. For most non-human primates, affiliative bonds are limited to direct social interactions among kin. As such, when a group grows in size and kinship ties become attenuated, there will be fewer opportunities for such interactions, and the group will eventually split apart.
Humans, however, have managed to overcome this problem, so much so that we now live in vast societies comprising millions of people. This level of cooperation is made possible by special stories, or identity-shaping narratives, which assign social roles to people. One’s role, in turn, defines one’s relationships vis-à-vis other members of society, while also furnishing a sense of identity and belonging. These narratives are at the center of foundational texts such as the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the Communist Manifesto, to name just a few.
Identity-shaping narratives form the basis for effecting internal change, whereby we widen our circle of affiliation and compassion beyond the bounds of our kin. Internal change affects our thoughts, feelings, and motivations; it drives us to pursue purposive ends in accordance with our norms and values. Through narrative-driven internal change, we shape our environment to promote external change, by creating structures that define social roles and hierarchies of legitimate power, as well as the institutions and incentives that sustain those arrangements.
Through internal and external change, social narratives shape each individual’s multiple, overlapping identities. People effortlessly understand what it is to be a family member, friend, neighbor, colleague, fellow congregant, political participant, and so on. In orderly, sustainable societies, these identities – at the local, regional, and national levels – all operate in harmony with one another.
Human history can thus be understood as a process – albeit one with many interruptions – of composing narratives that enable ever-larger groups of people to cooperate with one another for the sake of a common purpose. Hunter-gatherer societies lived in groups comprising just a few dozen people across several families, and they scarcely could have imagined membership in arrangements larger than that.
But then came agriculture. Humans became more sedentary, and they associated together in much larger numbers. These gatherings – in villages, cities, and, eventually, empires – required new narratives of affiliation. The modern nation-state is no different: it relies on a narrative that permits and enables people to cooperate in large numbers. With each new narrative, new feats of local, regional, and superregional cooperation have been achieved.
The Next Rung of the Ladder
Today, we have reached the next stage of our evolutionary process. Proliferating global problems demand new narratives, and a new form of cooperation at the global level. Over the past few decades, globalization – accompanied by offshoring and automation – has posed a challenge to national and local identities in many countries, threatening the harmony of local, national, and regional narratives. Given these challenges, forging a new global cooperative compact will not be easy.
And yet we already know what needs to be done. The current moment requires new identity-shaping narratives on a global scale, accompanied by appropriate agents of internal and external change. It is through such innovations that we transformed slavery from an acceptable form of international business into a globally acknowledged evil. It is also how many countries around the world enshrined respect for an expanding array of civil rights in recent decades.
The narratives underpinning these changes are embodied in now-canonical texts, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The articulation of each new narrative abetted internal change, enabling us to adopt the perspective of people who were previously strange to us. Our circle of compassion and affiliation widened further. And this development was then reinforced by external change, in the form of new social conventions, laws, and institutions.
Looking back, the speed at which these transformations spread across national borders is nothing short of remarkable. As in all major feats of human cooperation, identity-shaping narratives, internal change, and external change each played an indispensable role.
On the G20’s Shoulders
This taxonomy of human social evolution is vital for understanding the major shortcoming of today’s multilateral institutions. The G20 has always focused primarily on external change, in the form of joint communiqués, action plans, agreements, and other commitments. But it now must broaden its scope to contribute to narrative formation and internal change, too.
That starts with doing more to measure the primary factors behind human wellbeing. Only then can we determine how wellbeing is affected by national and international policies, and by business and civil-society activities. And to make the best use of these findings, we must facilitate the transfer of knowledge around the world, while protecting global public goods and the global commons.
Global-problem solving will require new skills to manage far-flung cooperation. But there is no reason to doubt that we are capable of acquiring them. After all, it was only 200 years ago that humanity began the process of achieving mass literacy – a skill that must be mastered person by person. In 1820, only 12% of the world’s population could read and write, whereas only 17% are unable to do so today. Without this extraordinary feat of education, narratives of national cooperation could not have spread as rapidly and widely as they did.
Likewise, today’s global problems would be much more manageable if people could learn to widen their perspectives and empathize with citizens of other countries. Fortunately, a growing body of research shows that adopting the perspective of others can be taught. Compassion is an acquirable skill, much like literacy. And, like literacy, such skills would position us to reap the rewards of global interconnectedness.
Generating external change and developing new cooperative narratives are complementary functions that the G20 could – and should – fulfill. The group encompasses two-thirds of the world’s population and accounts for 85% of global GDP. That makes it the multilateral institution that should lead the way in bringing together government and non-government stakeholders to effect the changes that people want – and that no amount of populist grandstanding can provide.
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KIEL – In country after country, populists are beckoning voters to pursue atavistic dreams of national glory and abandon international commitments and multilateral cooperation. This is the age of “America first,” “Take back control,” and “Hungary belongs to the Hungarians” – to cite just a few of the slogans one hears nowadays.
Yet, when it comes to global problems, there can be no alternative to cooperation. Without it, we will all be at the mercy of cyber conflicts, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation. We will be buffeted by the spillover effects of financial crises, failed states, pandemics, and massive involuntary migrations. And we will have to learn to live with water and food crises, increasingly catastrophic weather events, and ecosystem collapse.
The question, then, is how to save multilateralism from populist forces. In fact, while multilateralism certainly appears to be on a collision course with nationalism, the two are not necessarily incompatible. The task for multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the G20 is to bring them into a complementary alignment.
Multipronged Multilateralism
Multilateral organizations should focus not on what already works, but rather on what is missing in their approach to international issues. Broadly speaking, global-governance institutions need to shore up their battered legitimacy, which will require action in three areas.
The first could be called economic recoupling. In the past, the G20 has primarily emphasized financial and economic issues, and understandably so, given the 2008 global financial crisis and subsequent recession. But since then, many developed countries have also been confronting profound social crises. At the same time that societies have become more fragmented, economic growth has become decoupled from wellbeing. With many people feeling disempowered and alienated from their communities, multilateral institutions must focus on “recoupling” economic activities and social outcomes.
A second area of focus must be social engagement. For multilateralism to enjoy broad public support, it must engage citizens more directly, so that they have a stake in developing cooperative solutions to shared problems. And that leads to a third, complementary front for action: the development of identity-shaping narratives, which can furnish individuals with a sense of agency in effecting change – both within themselves and in their communities.
Among global-governance bodies, the G20 has a key role to play in reviving multilateralism, because it is the best positioned to bring together developed and major developing countries. In fact, the G20 is probably the only institution with the capacity to develop both concrete solutions to global problems and shared narratives to spur citizens into action. Through the G20, national and multilateral narratives can be reconciled in such a way that each strengthens the other.
Recoupling and Realignment
Recoupling social and economic outcomes is not just desirable in itself; it is also crucial for saving multilateralism. In recent years, populists have been able to claim that only they represent the disadvantaged or people threatened by economic and technological change. They purport to speak for those who have lost their jobs to outsourcing and automation, for young people facing unemployment in an increasingly high-skill labor market, and for communities that have been left behind in the era of globalization.
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Meanwhile, they have attacked institutions like the G20 for supposedly ignoring these problems, while focusing solely on issues that are most important to privileged elites. But the G20 can push back against this charge, first by acknowledging that the problems confronting many developed countries are not exclusively economic or rooted in inequality. After all, populists have been able to tap into voter discontent even in countries experiencing strong economic growth.
In many countries, the most fearful citizens are not necessarily poor. But they do feel disempowered. There is a growing sense that one cannot improve one’s fortunes through one’s own efforts. Against a backdrop of changing social environments, many people have come to believe that the system is stacked against the many for the benefit of the privileged few.
For those whose wellbeing has become decoupled from overall economic prosperity, the problem is not just economic, but also psychological. And the sooner that we recognize that fact, the sooner we can address these voters’ legitimate fears.
The responsibility for recoupling communities and socioeconomic outcomes will largely fall on national governments. But the G20 can contribute by coordinating policies across borders, sharing best practices, and establishing global norms. In the process, it will be promoting a form of multilateralism that directly serves national interests.
Moreover, many national interests depend on the sound management of global public goods such as financial stability, and of global commons such as fishing areas on the high seas. To safeguard such goods, multilateral institutions must discourage countries from acting unilaterally in pursuit of selfish national interests. The payoff of cooperation is generally positive for all countries involved.
Clearly, multilateralism can serve national interests. But multilateral institutions can be effective only when they enjoy social acceptance and political legitimacy. Achieving that will require increased social engagement.
Power to the People
Multilateralism will not be saved by technocrats, experts, and bureaucrats alone. Even the most astute and well-crafted paternalist policies will inevitably leave citizens feeling disempowered. When people are not adequately informed of a policy’s purpose, they will not feel inclined to support it – or its author. For policymakers in multilateral institutions, this problem becomes more acute when politicians blame them for national policy failures, while taking credit for successes – a pattern of behavior that underlies the European Union’s current malaise.
Another problem arises when a policy’s success depends on voluntary compliance from non-state actors such as businesses, civil-society organizations, and ordinary citizens. This dependence has increased as the G20 has widened its purview from macroeconomic and financial issues to cybersecurity, anti-corruption, climate action, and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Voluntary compliance requires an engaged global citizenry. People want to feel a sense of agency over transnational issues; when they do, they will readily accept multilateral interventions. Moreover, when people have the power to act in the global public interest, they will be more motivated to do so. Around the world, people are already advancing collective goals by recycling, purchasing fair-trade products and electric cars, and so forth.
Still, more action is needed. Conventional economic instruments – taxes, subsidies, regulations, and so forth – cannot elicit genuine social engagement. Treating people as rational, selfish, utility maximizers, in accordance with neoclassical economic orthodoxy, simply will not do. Rather, sustained service in the public good rests on other-directed, irreducibly social motives such as personal esteem and recognition, group affiliation, and altruism.
Unless such motives are activated in the service of civic participation, grassroots support, and political legitimacy, multilateral policies are ultimately doomed to failure, because they will inevitably be sabotaged from within. On the other hand, when enough citizens become involved, so, too, will businesses and non-governmental organizations.
For its part, the G20 should explore ways to bring business and politics back into line with the common good. For example, it could host debates on fundamental questions such as whether corporations of the future should maximize shareholder value or how governments should address the widening disconnect between geographic/political boundaries and the near-borderless world of digital social networks and data flows. Social engagement will be critical for answering such questions in ways that serve the public interest.
Social Stories
Much of humankind’s success as a species stems from the ability to cooperate beyond the bounds of kinship. For most non-human primates, affiliative bonds are limited to direct social interactions among kin. As such, when a group grows in size and kinship ties become attenuated, there will be fewer opportunities for such interactions, and the group will eventually split apart.
Humans, however, have managed to overcome this problem, so much so that we now live in vast societies comprising millions of people. This level of cooperation is made possible by special stories, or identity-shaping narratives, which assign social roles to people. One’s role, in turn, defines one’s relationships vis-à-vis other members of society, while also furnishing a sense of identity and belonging. These narratives are at the center of foundational texts such as the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the Communist Manifesto, to name just a few.
Identity-shaping narratives form the basis for effecting internal change, whereby we widen our circle of affiliation and compassion beyond the bounds of our kin. Internal change affects our thoughts, feelings, and motivations; it drives us to pursue purposive ends in accordance with our norms and values. Through narrative-driven internal change, we shape our environment to promote external change, by creating structures that define social roles and hierarchies of legitimate power, as well as the institutions and incentives that sustain those arrangements.
Through internal and external change, social narratives shape each individual’s multiple, overlapping identities. People effortlessly understand what it is to be a family member, friend, neighbor, colleague, fellow congregant, political participant, and so on. In orderly, sustainable societies, these identities – at the local, regional, and national levels – all operate in harmony with one another.
Human history can thus be understood as a process – albeit one with many interruptions – of composing narratives that enable ever-larger groups of people to cooperate with one another for the sake of a common purpose. Hunter-gatherer societies lived in groups comprising just a few dozen people across several families, and they scarcely could have imagined membership in arrangements larger than that.
But then came agriculture. Humans became more sedentary, and they associated together in much larger numbers. These gatherings – in villages, cities, and, eventually, empires – required new narratives of affiliation. The modern nation-state is no different: it relies on a narrative that permits and enables people to cooperate in large numbers. With each new narrative, new feats of local, regional, and superregional cooperation have been achieved.
The Next Rung of the Ladder
Today, we have reached the next stage of our evolutionary process. Proliferating global problems demand new narratives, and a new form of cooperation at the global level. Over the past few decades, globalization – accompanied by offshoring and automation – has posed a challenge to national and local identities in many countries, threatening the harmony of local, national, and regional narratives. Given these challenges, forging a new global cooperative compact will not be easy.
And yet we already know what needs to be done. The current moment requires new identity-shaping narratives on a global scale, accompanied by appropriate agents of internal and external change. It is through such innovations that we transformed slavery from an acceptable form of international business into a globally acknowledged evil. It is also how many countries around the world enshrined respect for an expanding array of civil rights in recent decades.
The narratives underpinning these changes are embodied in now-canonical texts, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The articulation of each new narrative abetted internal change, enabling us to adopt the perspective of people who were previously strange to us. Our circle of compassion and affiliation widened further. And this development was then reinforced by external change, in the form of new social conventions, laws, and institutions.
Looking back, the speed at which these transformations spread across national borders is nothing short of remarkable. As in all major feats of human cooperation, identity-shaping narratives, internal change, and external change each played an indispensable role.
On the G20’s Shoulders
This taxonomy of human social evolution is vital for understanding the major shortcoming of today’s multilateral institutions. The G20 has always focused primarily on external change, in the form of joint communiqués, action plans, agreements, and other commitments. But it now must broaden its scope to contribute to narrative formation and internal change, too.
That starts with doing more to measure the primary factors behind human wellbeing. Only then can we determine how wellbeing is affected by national and international policies, and by business and civil-society activities. And to make the best use of these findings, we must facilitate the transfer of knowledge around the world, while protecting global public goods and the global commons.
Global-problem solving will require new skills to manage far-flung cooperation. But there is no reason to doubt that we are capable of acquiring them. After all, it was only 200 years ago that humanity began the process of achieving mass literacy – a skill that must be mastered person by person. In 1820, only 12% of the world’s population could read and write, whereas only 17% are unable to do so today. Without this extraordinary feat of education, narratives of national cooperation could not have spread as rapidly and widely as they did.
Likewise, today’s global problems would be much more manageable if people could learn to widen their perspectives and empathize with citizens of other countries. Fortunately, a growing body of research shows that adopting the perspective of others can be taught. Compassion is an acquirable skill, much like literacy. And, like literacy, such skills would position us to reap the rewards of global interconnectedness.
Generating external change and developing new cooperative narratives are complementary functions that the G20 could – and should – fulfill. The group encompasses two-thirds of the world’s population and accounts for 85% of global GDP. That makes it the multilateral institution that should lead the way in bringing together government and non-government stakeholders to effect the changes that people want – and that no amount of populist grandstanding can provide.